Joanna Biggs

It’s​ a while since I saw Cléo de 5 à 7, but I remember that it opens with a tarot spread. The tarot reader draws cards in groups of three, for past, present and future. The young woman with her, Cléo Victoire, her blonde hair elaborately curled back onto her head like a Parisian Dusty Springfield, bites her fingers, covers her face, and after confessing that...

One​ of the puzzling things about feminism is that it can be confused with being self-centred. If it’s good for me, a woman might say of something she wants to do – whether it’s Botox injections, running a country, writing a book or being chronically late – then it’s good for feminism! Sometimes this sort of reasoning is a necessary release; sometimes...

‘Ihope the book gives you a sense of joy, something to immerse yourself in that is not the horrific news that we’ve been experiencing constantly and relentlessly since March,’ Brit Bennett said of her new novel. The Vanishing Half came out a week after George Floyd was choked to death on a Minneapolis sidewalk; the novel itself begins weeks after Martin Luther King was...

‘Iwould like to be able to photograph constantly, every hour, every conscious hour,’ Dorothea Lange told an interviewer in 1963, two years before she died. There had always been constraints on how she could photograph: first, the limp that remained after she had polio when she was seven, growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey in a German immigrant family; then the need to make money at...

When​ is the right time to ask for what you want? One of the strange things about the feminist movement is that what women want hasn’t been that much of a mystery at all. (Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Simone de Beauvoir: century after century, girls just wanna be human, not other.) But finding the moment to speak and the words to use? Reading Breanne Fahs’s collection of...